Aurora

Amazon Aurora Global Database is designed for globally distributed applications, allowing a single Amazon Aurora database to span multiple AWS regions. It replicates your data with no impact on database performance, enables fast local reads with low latency in each region, and provides disaster recovery from region-wide outages. In disaster recovery situations, you can promote a secondary region to take full read-write responsibilities in under a minute.

With an Aurora global database, there are two different approaches to failover depending on the scenario.

Failover – Use this approach to recover from an unplanned outage. With this approach, you perform a cross-Region failover to one of the secondary DB clusters in your Aurora global database. The RPO for this approach is typically a non-zero value measured in seconds. The amount of data loss depends on the Aurora global database replication lag across the AWS Regions at the time of the failure. To learn more, see Recovering an Amazon Aurora global database from an unplanned outage.

Switchover – This operation was previously called “managed planned failover.” Use this approach for controlled scenarios, such as operational maintenance and other planned operational procedures. Because this feature synchronizes secondary DB clusters with the primary before making any other changes, RPO is 0 (no data loss). To learn more, see Performing switchovers for Amazon Aurora global databases.

In a true disaster scenario you will most likely use Failover, which are showcased in Module 2: Pilot Light and Module 4: Hot Standby.

For this workshop we will be doing a Switchover.

Promote Aurora

1.1 Click RDS to navigate to the dashboard in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) region.

1.2 Look at the warm-global Global database. Notice how we have a Primary cluster in us-east-1 which has our Writer instance and a Secondary cluster in us-west-1 which has our Reader instance.

1.3 Select warm-global cluster and select Switch over or fail over global database from Actions.

1.4 Choose Switchover, select warm-secondary as New primary cluster, then click Confirm.

1.5 When the switchover is complete, notice the changes. The Primary cluster is now in us-west-1 which has our Writer instance and the Secondary Cluster is now in us-east-1 which has our Reader instance.